Stacking Pull Requests

Stacking PRs

I tried out GitHub’s PR stack­ing func­tion­al­ity for the first time this week. I have to say — it’s amaz­ing.

Instead of im­ple­ment­ing the en­tirety of Harper Desktop’s Windows sup­port in a sin­gle mas­sive PR (as I tend to do far too of­ten), I de­cided to sep­a­rate the work out into in­di­vid­ual PRs and stack them.

I am some­one who goes on a lot of tan­gents while work­ing. While writ­ing a new mod­ule or crate, I of­ten find my­self dis­cov­er­ing prob­lems with my pre­vi­ous work. To get the new mod­ule to a place I am sat­is­fied with, I will need to go back and make changes to some­thing seem­ingly un­re­lated in or­der to keep up a high bar of qual­ity. Stacked PRs make this or­ga­ni­za­tion­ally pos­si­ble. I can make my tan­gen­tial changes as a part of a sec­ond PR, ei­ther be­fore or af­ter the cur­rent one in the stack.

It’s re­ally nice, I sug­gest you give it a whirl. Plus, the TUI for it is pretty slick.